Bulk upload and tagging: starting point?

[dmallen]

I'm using Alfresco Labs 3b, and I'm looking for the right documentation on how to do bulk upload and tagging.

I have a few hundred office documents (XLS, DOC, PPT) and a single Excel sheet with user-assigned tags and categories for most of the documents.  What I'm trying to accomplish is to jam all of the documents into alfresco in their existing (very simple) directory structure, and associate all of the tags in the excel sheet to the proper document.

I'm figuring there's some way to bulk upload all of the documents, and then I'm going to have to develop some code to get the tags out of the Excel sheet and communicate them to Alfresco in some way via some API.  I'm fine with doing the coding. 

The only method I've found to do the bulk upload so far is via CIFS, which from the looks of it requires an extension that isn't free.  I'm sure there are other methods, I'm just not seeing them.  I'm also seeing a lot of reference to configuration files (such as file-servers-custom.xml) that don't exist in my disto – it's not clear from the documentation whether I'm supposed to create them, or whether they come by default with some extra software component I might be missing.

Can someone point me to the right documentation where I can hunt down how to do this?

Thanks

[derek]

Hi,

There are several ways that this could be tackled.  If you write a remote Alfresco client, you could use Web Scripts or even Web Services.  If you use embedded code, you could make use of the Foundation Services such as FileFolderService.  Take a look at some of the SDK samples.

The problem with CIFS, FTP and WebDAV is that they don't allow the setting of proprietary properties.

[dmallen]

Thanks derek – I'm getting started looking into the foundational API which looks like it might be a decent match with what I already can do code-wise and what I need to accomplish.

Now off to wrestle with eclipse and compile dependencies…